The Velvet Hammer

Like one of the everywoman heroes of the populist blockbuster entertainments she's nurtured on the USA Network, Bonnie Hammer—not unlike onetime mentor Barry Diller—conquers all with moxie and a dependable sixth sense for success.

For a moment, when Bonnie Hammer—head of NBC ­Universal's USA cable network and arguably the most powerful woman in Rockefeller Center—takes a seat with her execs in their ­twenty-first-floor conference room, I lose her. She's a pixieish 5'4" in a cropped blue suede Gucci jacket cinched at the waist with a black alligator-skin belt, and almost the entire ensemble, from her camisole down to her calf-high Manolo boots, has been swallowed up behind the large, black oak boardroom table. Then, to signal the start of their weekly meeting, she deadpans to the room, "Everybody, hide the wine." And there she is again.

More From ELLE

At 60, Hammer has turned a lot of water into wine—and ratings, and money—for NBC since it bought the USA family of cable channels in 2004. She had already worked her sleight of hand on the Sci Fi channel, which she turned from nerd nirvana into a top-six performer in three years. (She also attracted a huge ­female following. "The misconception was that science fiction is a genre for young men," she says. "But excuse me, who wrote Frankenstein? Mary Shelley! I don't see a guy there.")

Under her leadership, USA has ridden an unprecedented 18 straight quarters as the country's highest-rated cable network; last year it made almost $2 billion in operating revenue, while NBC's ailing broadcast enter­tainment division is rumored to have lost upward of $300 million. One imagines that network meetings on other floors of 30 Rock are wracked with tension. But in this room, with Hammer at its head, it's business as usual, and that business is ­unusually good—enough so, at least, that Hammer often breaks character as a straight-talking, all-business executive and lets a bit of the brassy Queens girl in her peek through. Her ­accent, all but kaput after 30-plus years of splitting time between Manhattan and her home in Connecticut, resurfaces when she turns to her VP of ad sales and asks, ­"Steven, how much money do we have—and what's my cut?"

Of course, Hammer's reputation as a fixer didn't come from getting too comfortable. "I'm always nervous," she told me at lunch in a hushed corner of the building's Sea Grill restaurant before the meeting. Flash back to 2009, after Sci Fi's uneasy ­rebranding to Syfy began and USA's White Collar, the con-man-and-G-man buddy drama, launched just as one of the ­network's biggest hits, Monk, was ending. "Things were pumping. We were number one for the fourth year in a row, on the way to our fifth, knock on wood," she says. "Then the sale happened." She is referring to Com­cast's announcement of plans to acquire NBC (pending Federal Communications Commission approval), which set off a year-and-a-half-long game of speculation and musical chairs that unseated CEO and onetime wunderkind Jeff Zucker and Hammer's boss, television entertainment division chief Jeff Gaspin. But Hammer and Bravo head Lauren Zalaznick were the gossip mill's title fight—reportedly jockeying not only to step up, but to do so in relation to each other. Hammer calls the reports nonsense and points out that she and Zalaznick are "not even [corporate] competitors. We have our own worlds. But when it's women, people think catfight. It's bogus."

Hammer, long rumored to be favored for the top spot running the broadcast lineup, stayed put at USA but expanded her empire as the new chairman of NBC's cable division and studios and added Comcast's E! and G4 channels to her portfolio. As Zucker told me, "USA is one of the most impor­tant networks­­ out there. And it has an enormous impact on the ­bottom line of this company."

The payoff was big, but the idea was ­simple: "Characters Welcome." The network's near-dogmatic credo begins with what Hammer calls "the filter," a short but exacting checklist of what it takes for a show to air on USA: It must star an offbeat lead with a moral center, be fun and lighthearted, and have "blue skies"—Hammer's code for hopeful, ­aspirational, and not in line with cable's dark-side-of-the-dial rep.

The result is a small but wildly popular slate of quirky shows: Burn Notice, about a fired spy turned sleuth stranded in Miami with his risk-seeking ex and estranged mother; Royal Pains, about a doctor on call in the neurotic, beachy wonderland of the Hamptons; and the January debut, Fairly Legal, about a lawyer who ditches her dead ­father's law firm to ­become a mediator.

"It's a world where the clothing is elegant and the champagne is excellent," says Royal Pains star Mark Feuerstein about the sunny space USA inhabits. Feuerstein has also seen Hammer define the boundaries of that world. By its third episode, a note came that she wanted to see the Other Hamptons: the fishermen, gardeners, and domestics that orbit the show's tony patients-of-the-week. "That is what executives should do," Feuerstein says. "Take the temperature of the country. In a recession, do I want to watch a bunch of upper-upper-class people?"

The more you map out the network's hit-making DNA, the more you uncover Hammer's own genes. She grew up in a modest split-level home in Queens. Her father, a Russian immigrant, built up a small pen-manufacturing business. Hammer remembers watching Gale Storm, the star of My Little Margie and The Gale Storm Show, two sitcoms about mischievous young women. Later, it was Mary Tyler Moore, "in every series she was ever in," then Cagney & Lacey. (Cagney's Sharon Gless would later star as Jeffrey Donovan's raspy-voiced mother on Burn Notice; last year, she earned the show its first acting Emmy nom—a coup for the network, which is often passed over by ­critics.) "Even then, I was drawn to what I called `the people' in those shows—`characters' wasn't even a word for me yet."

More From ELLE

Hammer studied communications at Boston University and got into photography. Her work appeared in Time, the Boston Herald, and the Los Angeles Times. Other photos, taken with her well-worn 1967 Nikon, fill family albums: husband Dale Heussner, a management consultant; step-daughter KiMae, 31; and son Jesse, 17.

Just as Hammer's exacting "filter" defines USA's capital-C characters, her equally precise aesthetic clothes them. On her own slight frame, each piece has its purpose: Today, from a carefully curated collection of pencil skirts, she sports a dark, lush Ralph Lauren Purple Label and a large-faced men's Panerai watch—the same sort Sly Stallone wears. On set, if a color is too dour for the setting or a tag too pricey for the character, Hammer will notice. Soon, a more appropriate outfit will be rushing on its way to the Hamptons for Royal Pains' unfussy hospital admin, Jill Flint, to don. British actress Gabrielle Anwar, the epitome of Miami cool in Burn Notice, has a term for it: "You mean, Hammer Time?"

The weekly meeting of USA brass is anything but Hammer Time. Eight execs are there from every corner of the kingdom—scheduling, brand strategy, communications, and beyond. This was Hammer's first priority when she took the reins: "breaking down the silos," she calls it. Most networks have cordoned off depart­ments, but here every group has input into the others' operations, and every top exec gets a vote on new scripts. Today, they consider a family-life comedy. Hammer, maybe recalling the sitcoms of her childhood, or perhaps due to the success of shows like Modern Family, tells me, "We've been asking ourselves, `What is the present-day All in the Family?' " After weighing everyone's opinion, Hammer says something surprising: "Everybody take ­another 10 days to think about it."

Burn Notice—the very model of addictive middlebrow TV, averaging about 6 ­million viewers last summer—was created by Matt Nix, who volleyed his pilot script back and forth with Hammer for a year before it was "blue skies" enough. Still, he says working for USA is "never a difficult process. They know what they want! As a ­writer in Hollywood, a lot of times you work with executives who are throwing darts with their eyes closed—and they're throwing them at you."

You could chalk up Hammer's inclusiveness to running the network "like a woman." But the truth, as Hammer is never wont to sugarcoat, is a bit different: "If I'm honest with myself, it came from a place of insecurity. When I was a young executive, I was always nervous that my idea wouldn't be great. So I asked around, `What do you think of this?' That became my filter for whether my idea was good enough. Then I realized it just plain made me smarter."

Hammer has been with USA for most of her career (following stints with local TV and Lifetime)—as it passed from Barry Diller to ­Vivendi to GE and now Comcast. It was Diller who made her head of Sci Fi in 2001 and became one of her strongest allies. When ­colleagues questioned her Steven Spielberg–produced miniseries, Taken, which cost a record $40 million, Diller watched the first episode and e-mailed her, Honey, if all your episodes are as gluely—"A word he made up," Hammer says, smiling—compelling, then dear, I think you have a hit on your hands. Ignore the world.

But for her first year working for Diller, Hammer says she was afraid of him. "Barry's larger than life—very opinionated—and did not suffer fools well," she says. "If you didn't know what you were talking about, you didn't open your mouth." So she didn't. She watched Stephen Rosenberg, Diller's star head of distribution, and found the way to tango with Diller was to come armed and ready to fight for your opinion.

One weekend, the two sparred on the topic of medium John Edward's hugely popular series, Crossing Over. The first e-mail came at 3 p.m. on a Friday. If it's real, asked Diller, how is it science fiction? "Then we had a long, bizarre, philosophical chain of e-mails about how speculative fiction is all in the eye of the beholder." Every few hours an e-mail would arrive from Diller—"written in 16-point font, always in color, and always in caps"—with a new counterpoint. The last, sent after 11 p.m. on a Sunday night, read simply, Your argument wins. "Having survived Barry," Hammer says, "there's nobody I can't go toe-to-toe with."

But Vince McMahon, CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, which airs some of the most successful programming on Syfy and USA, always knew Hammer as a force of ­nature. As a junior exec in the 1990s, Hammer was handed the wrestling beat, and "I thought, If this is what my career is coming to, I should quit, " she says. But her husband persuaded her to "have a sense of humor and try it out." After two weeks watching tapes, she drove to Stamford, Connecticut, to "kiss the ring, so to speak," and told the 6'2", 248-pound McMahon, "Until two weeks ago, I had never watched your show in my life. I don't know anything about your business. What I do know is how to make good television." From then on, she says, "he took every call personally."

Hammer recounts the story, one of her oft-repeated favorites over the years, as I sit in her cavernous, immaculately decorated office under a blinding gold WWE cham­pionship belt mounted on the wall. "She ­deserves that championship belt," McMahon tells me later. "She's earned it."